Monday, September 29, 2014

From ‘The Living Gandhi. Lessons for our times’ Edited by Tara Sethia and Anjana Narayan

‘So it comes to this that under exceptional circumstances
war may have to be resorted to as a necessary evil …. If the motive is right,
it may turn out to the profit of mankind, and that an ahimsaist may not stand
aside and look on with indifference, but must make the choice and actively
cooperate or actively resist’

For Gandhi, the drive to increase material wants is the
essence of the modern West and its fatal flaw; it is the engine of imperial
expansion, of economic inequality and exploitation, the seed of war and the
cause of environmental despoliation.

…Gandhi admonished that ‘the test of orderliness in a
country is not the number of millionaires it owns but the absence of starvation
among its masses.’

Gandhi’s candour and integrity have the additional benefit
of encouraging similar behavior among those around him: as Erik Erikson
reported, ‘In his presence, one could not tell a lie.’

…..Macauley said:

the intellectual improvement of those classes of the people who have the means of pursuing higher
studies can at present be affected only by means of some language not
vernacular amongst them …..

a single shelf of a good European library was worth the
whole native literature of India and Arabia….

it is impossible for
us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people.
We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between
us and the millions whom we govern – a
class of persons in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in
morals and in intellect ….

Mahatma Jotirao Phule’s historic memorandum to the Hunter
Commission in 1882 questioned the sociopolitical character of knowledge in
education imparted by the British Raj. It lamented that almost all the teachers
employed in the primary schools were Brahmins, not used to productive manual
labour. Their students in turn imbibed ‘inactive habits’ and tried to obtain
government service. Phule proposed that teachers of primary school should be
those ‘who will not feel ashamed to hold
the handle of a plough or the carpenter’s adze when required’ and who will
be able to mix themselves readily with
the lower orders of society’.

Gandhi asserted that:

The foundation that Macauley laid of education has enslaved
us … [Was] it not a sad commentary that we should have to speak of Swarajya [Self-Rule] in a foreign
tongue?

….Nai Taleem ….whatever be taught to children, all of it should be taught necessarily
through the medium of a trade or handicraft …. The brain must be educated through the hand.

He warned that education through English medium has resulted
in ‘a permanent bar between the highly educated few and the uneducated many’
and ‘made our children practically foreigners in their own land.’

…the social character of the occupations that Gandhi
envisaged for introduction into the curriculum. These occupations included
spinning, weaving,…..tanning …..pottery, farming, ….building and cleaning
latrines … Without exception, all these occupations involved manual work and
were undertaken primarily by the lower classes/castes viz. Dalits, tribals,
Other Backword Classes and Muslim artisans, with the women among them playing a
significant role.

The political message is inescapable: accord these occupations and the communities engaged in them a central
place of dignity in the education system that was never their destiny in Indian
history.

….educationist Krishna Kumar noted that ‘a low-caste child
would feel far more at home than an upper-caste child’ in schools pursuing the
Gandhian curriculum, thereby making ‘the education system stand on its head.’

When children learn through productive work, the Macaulayian
practice of prescribing textbooks would become superfluous, just as Gandhi had
passionately argued. Instead of textbooks, each school would have a reference
library or resource material drawn from both local and global sources as well
as texts, oral or written (now multimedia too), prepared by the community and
children themselves. This radical concept of how children learn should enable
the school collective of students and teachers ‘to seek answers to the
questions that arise in their minds … queries would reflect the nature and the
stage of their engagement with the physical and social world around them’.
Expectedly, the ‘path to knowledge will thus become entirely open-ended,
non-linear and contextual.’

At the end of the Wardha Conference in 1937, Gandhi said, ‘I
have given many things to India. But this system of education …is, I feel, the
best of them.’ Yet, what to Gandhi was his best gift to India is precisely what
the Indian state negated. …..India continues to adhere to the Macaulayian
framework instituted more than 175 years ago!

Gandhi realized that the knowledge that the constituents of
the informal economy – that is, farmers, artisans, women, adivasis and small
retailers – possess is found abundantly in society. However, this lokavidya (loka = people/world, vidya
= knowledge/skill/art) does not have the prestige enjoyed by school and
university knowledge. Ordinary life and work are not even considered
knowledge-generating activities. Gandhi’s economic programme was intended to
take full advantage of the knowledge found among the people in order to make
economic development inclusive for all.

….Gandhi’s economic and political impulse was to
decentralize rather than centralize. Village industries (or ‘dispersed
industrialization’) and panchayats, two cornerstones of Gandhian economics and
polity, are testaments to this fact.

…..Gandhi says

….we have to concentrate on the village being
self-contained, manufacturing mainly for use. Provided this character of the
industry is maintained there would be no objection to villagers using even the
modern machines and tools that they can make and can afford to use.

Not only does small-scale and dispersed industry rely on a
widely available knowledge base, but in turn the presence of a thriving
industry itself creates the conditions for an intelligent populace. Thus:

Since the wanton destruction of this central village
industry and the allied handicrafts,
intelligence and brightness have fled from the villages, leaving them
inane, lusterless, and reduced almost to the state of their ill-kept cattle.

…Gandhi’s insistence on craft-based production by the masses
(as opposed to capital-intensive mass production designed by experts) can be
seen as not only a response to mass unemployment, but also as an attempt to
preserve the link between the masses and science.

Gandhi’s criticism of modern science is that its supposed
objectivity or value-neutrality (the so-called separation of fact from value)
actualy hides a value system that can be just as easily anti-human as it can be
pro-human. Similarly, knowledge gathered under the command of capital must
submit to profit as the most important value. In contrast to knowledge gathered
in the regimes of science and capital, lokavidya can be defined as a knowledge
system that does not claim value-neutrality nor accords primary place to profit,
but instead keepst at its centre the value of lokahita or sarvodaya

….Gandhi attacks ‘Western civilization’ not because
individuals influenced by it are selfish and greedy – indeed individuals in any
civilization can be so – but because this civilization makes greed and
selfishness into ideals to be aspired to.

‘What I object to is the craze for machinery, not machinery
as such. The craze is for what they call labour-saving machinery. Men go on
saving labour, till thousands are out of work and thrown on to the open streets
to die of starvation.’